I know this is blasphemy, but I really enjoyed House of the Dead. I got exactly what I wanted from that movie (killing zombies and not the emo-zobmies or Aesop zombies that George Romero's latest movies have been subjecting us to - diary of the dead and island of the dead come to mind.)

I agree, I mean in order for them to take you to court they need (apparently) a picture of your IP downloading the file. If they get caught fabricating these lists then it'll be lights-out for this blackmail system.

There are plenty of people who are into light to severe masochism out there, easily in the thousands.

It's a gateway really. You watch Uwe Boll movies, and maybe Street Fighter, and tell yourself "It's so bad, its funny!" Eventually though, the crappulence gets boring, you move to harder stuff, like the Mortal Kombat movie (not the new proof of concept one). Before you know it, you're living in a gutter, offering sexual favors for a copy of the Star Wars Holiday special.

I applaud Herr Boll for trying to clean up the streets and atone for his past actions.

There are plenty of people who are into light to severe masochism out there, easily in the thousands.

I don't think it's masochism. Sometimes I just want to watch a laughably bad movie. I don't know why, I just do. When I was a kid, I used to love those Saturday afternoon kung fu movies on our local independent station. I didn't just go to see Battlefield Earth, I actually paid good money to see it in a theater. Not even as a matinee. To this day, I'll often watch whatever crapbomb is on Syfy on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. If you think Uwe Boll is bad, try watching Atomic Twister sometime.

I dunno, it's just fun to sit there and watch a movie thinking, "Whoa, that's three miles past bad." It's also fun to talk about them with my friends. "Oh yeah? You thought that was bad? Let me tell you what I saw last Saturday!"

By the way, I don't know why you lumped Mortal Kombat with those types of movies. Did it win an Oscar? Hell no, but it was still actually kind of neat and exciting to watch. It actually had some redeeming qualities to it. The fight scene with Subzero was awesome. I thought Linden Ashby's (Johnny Cage) fight with Goro was cool, too. The start of it was hilarious. Anyway, there's a difference between mindless fun action and just plain bad. It was Mortal Kombat. What exactly were you expecting?

That is what it really is all about. Making money out of the first few weeks of really bad movies. Churn out a crap movie and then spend more on advertising the movie than you spent making the movie, select the few isolated best scenes for the preview (even by accident these can occur), pay off the reviewers and generate a profit. No different to the model for the majority of the music industry.

Streaming kills this revenue stream, everyone learns exactly how bad the movie is and are no longer sucked in by deceitful advertising and disingenuous reviews, so they don't spend their money on a ticket finding out the truly annoying way how much the quality of movies differed from the lies put forward by the advertising.

So they sueing everyone the streamed the first 10 to 15 minutes and decided not to waste their time and money on a cinema ticket is the only way for them to generate a profit and continue in their degenerate couch castings ways (believe it or not BJ in limos and abusing teenagers with delusions of future movie stardom and major motivators in their business choice, more than the profit).

So sick liars, doing sick things so that they can continue in their sick ways, now that's just plain sick. All brought to you by lawyers who created and exploit a corrupted legal system, that can specifically victimise the poor.

I dare you to find worse than Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter [imdb.com]. It has a kung-fu second coming of Jesus, a priest with a punk hairdo riding a vespa, and a newspaper headline reading "Critical shortage of lesbians". Other than that the movie has no redeemable qualities whatsoever, and the fact that video and audio aren't synchronized very well gets on your nerves pretty fast doesn't help either.

Having said that, if you like bad horror movies a good laugh is Bad Taste [imdb.com] by Peter Jackson, but you probably already hav

That's a good point:If you download a movie that has played on a television channel you have a subscription to then doesn't it become an instance of time-shifting, like a VCR or Tivo? It just saves you the bother of having to program your recorder.

None of these people are proven to be pirates. Uwe Boll claims they are. But that doesn't mean you get to report that they are. The headline should be "Uwe Boll, Other Flimmakers Sue Thousands of People".

Or they could just end the summary with a question mark. Been working for TV news for some time. They can say just about anything, as long as it posed a question. For example, if a news show said "Michael Moore downloaded child porn." they would get tagged for slander pretty quick. But making it "Michael Moore downloaded child porn?" gets a free pass.

The point in question is "Rule 20, which Judge Collyer referenced in her order, plaintiffs may only join defendants in a lawsuit if:

* They assert any right to relief jointly, severally, or in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences; and
* Any question of law or fact common to all plaintiffs will arise in the action."

I have no problem with them suing downloaders for the $19.95 they would have spent if they had bought the movie, perhaps even $59.85 with treble damages. Anything more than that is extortion, not actual damages. Uploading, that is a different story.

"A brief entry in the official court docket lays out the order. "MINUTE ORDER requiring Plaintiff to show cause in writing no later than June 21, 2010 why Doe Defendants 2 through 2000 should not be dismissed for misjoinder under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20," wrote the judge in The Steam Experiment case. The same order was repeated in a separate case targeting 4,577 users alleged to have shared the film Far Cry."

(A) they assert any right to relief jointly, severally, or in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences; and

(B) any question of law or fact common to all plaintiffs will arise in the action. "

Unless all of these people were a part of some vast conspiracy to download the same movie from the same source en mass, they can't be joined together in a single lawsuit. Explain how my post is wrong, based on the entry in the court docket and Procedure 20.

Unless all of these people were a part of some vast conspiracy to download the same movie from the same source en mass, they can't be joined together in a single lawsuit. Explain how my post is wrong, based on the entry in the court docket and Procedure 20.

What does people joining together as plaintiffs (Procedure 20) have to do with joining defendants together in court motions?

Your supporting quote is not relevant, whether or not your point is correct.

Thanks for pointing that out. here is the relevant portion, from the same link:

Persons -- as well as a vessel, cargo, or other property subject to admiralty process in rem -- may be joined in one action as defendants if:

(A) any right to relief is asserted against them jointly, severally, or in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences; and

(B) any question of law or fact common to all defendants will arise in the action.

I hereby declare that on July 1st through July 4th we will celebrate the Independence of these United States by having a four day hunting season on trial lawyers. No bag limit! We do need certain rules to ensure fair chase:1. No hunting within 200 feet of an Ambulance.2. No standing on a corner yelling "Free Scotch".

From Uwe Boll's wikipedia entry (this is priceless):
"Another reviewer wrote that Alone in the Dark was "so poorly built, so horribly acted and so sloppily stitched together that it's not even at the straight-to-DVD level."[16] For example, in one scene a character who was "killed" can visibly be seen getting up as the actor prematurely made the move to get off the set."

Actually, you are wrong, I can sue you for just about anything I want, but that doesn't mean the courts are going to rule in my favour, or even have the lawsuit at all, they could just through it away, like they are doing now.

But all in all, there is no way sure fire way to not get sued.

I'll ignore the whole bit about pirating movies and why some people do it, that's a broken record that can be found on about 10% of slashdot articles.

That was a pretty good summary of the civil court system.:) But you left out the part that you (the plaintiff) may still will in court on an unjustified lawsuit. A lot of it has to do with how good the lawyers are for both sides. If there is a jury involved, it's all showmanship. Whoever puts on the best show wins.

Plaintiff with a big budget versus defendant who can barely afford to keep his Internet connection, I'd wager on the plaintiff.

The only sure way not to get sued is to not be on record anywhere, and never have contact of any sort with anyone. If no one knows who you are, and no one finds out about you, then you're almost safe. That is becoming harder and harder to do though.

Actually, given the number of people who have been sued, the well-known cases of them suing innocents, and the number of people likely to be downloading movies...

I'd say you are just about as likely to be sued if you pirate as if you don't. The average chance of being sued is near-zero, really, and the chances of them making an error are high enough that the difference between the two likelihoods is statistical noise.

1) The software they use to determine who is downloading a movie may not give accurate results. This was particularly true with Kazza Lite. You could ask it for a list of IPs of people on a share and it would return incorrect results. So, maybe your IP got reported incorrectly.

2) Your ISP could give them incorrect information. Perhaps their logs of who had the IP at a given time were incorrect. Let's not pretend like software never fucks up. Perhaps they got tampered with (it is just text files after all). Maybe one of their admins was doing the downloading and falsified the logs to cover his tracks.

3) Your net connection could have been used without your knowledge. Unless you are really serious about wireless security, someone could have used it. Many people run open APs or WEP and that can easily be bypassed. So it is perfectly possible for someone to have used your connection to download.

That is one of the many problems with lawsuits like these. You really can't be sure that the people being sued are the people who did the downloading. So not doing it is NOT good enough to prevent you from getting sued. You could still find yourself hit with a lawsuit. You claim "But I didn't do it!" and they say "Ya right, pay us the extortion money or we take you to court."

Exactly. Not to mention all the possible exploits there are out there. I can tell you with 100% confidence right now that anybody running Skype can be used as a proxy without their knowledge in any way, and its completely untraceable.
Computer security for anything other than major business is a joke, and people need to realize that.

While all those points may be valid, don't forget that we're talking about civil law here, not criminal. The standard is preponderance of the evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

So when an IP shows up as having downloaded a file, and the ISP provides the logs which map the IP address to a person, the question before the jury isn't "Does that prove conclusively that that person downloaded a file?" but rather "Given the evidence, is it more likely than not that they did?". The plaintiffs really only have to prove there's a 51% chance you downloaded the file. It's not a very high burden.

And that is why it is such a problem. Given that they can show up with some pretty shoddy evidence and your only way to defend yourself is to mount a defense more expensive than paying their extortion fee, you more or less have to pay the fee even if you are innocent.

The idea that you can be sued, successfully, for six figures for supposedly downloading a movie on very weak evidence is a problem. More or less there is no reason for them to try and make sure the suits are legit since people are forced to settle or have their lives ruined.

If this was something like a civil traffic ticket, where you are being charged a hundred bucks and you can defend yourself without drastically increasing the amount, I'd be ok with it. You don't need a massive amount of evidence in that case. However here people are being sued for many orders of magnitude over the actual value of the product on weak evidence, and have to settle for thousands, even if they are innocent.

You could literally shoplift the same movie, a crime which causes actual harm, and be given better representation and face far less sanctions if found guilty. A first offense shoplifting charge here for low values of merchandise will get you a fine of $250 plus the value of the merchandise and probation. That is for a crime where actual harm is caused (the store loses the value of the item you stole) not one with just theoretical harm (in a download, they theoretically lost a sale, but in many cases actually did not).

Lower the fine to a level reasonable with the nature of the crime (victimless crimes like speeding or jaywalking) and allow people to defend themselves in a civil court like traffic court and I'm ok with it. Keep lawsuits in the 6 figure range, and I cannot support something on so flimsy an evidence.

Last year I received 3 separate emails from my ISP claiming copyright violations. Two were for downloading movies and one for a game title. My household consists of my husband and I - we have no children or room-mates to be messing around with our computers. After each email I called the ISP to tell them that we hadn't downloaded the content and were basically told that their software said we did and they didn't believe us. After much yelling and 2 more emails, we finally figured out that the problem was a cable modem that we had used briefly before switching back to an older model. The new one had gone back to the store where we bought it and evidently was purchased by someone else for use at the same ISP. Given cable company monopolies, this shouldn't be too surprising. Long story short, they still had the MAC address of that returned modem linked to my account. It was only after they blocked access for that MAC address and got a phone call from the other subscriber that they truly believed us.
If anyone had gotten sued over this mess, it would have been my husband and I, despite our complete innocence. We would have been essentially blackmailed into settling rather than risk a court believing us as much as the techs at the ISP did.

Then that means we could have a huge class-action lawsuit against any ISP for virus infections or any company that had their computers botneted.

I've never understood why companies who have a professional IT staff are held blameless when their systems are infiltrated but the average Joe with no real computer expertise is expected to be responsible for the exploits of his systems. Why do we expect a cable subscriber to be able to lock down their network when AT&T cannot?

Also a sure fire 100% guaranteed way to get modded into oblivion I'm sure, but whatever. I just have to ask though: Who the fuck is pirating a Uwe Boll movie? You deserve to get sued morons.

Actually, you're going to (or should) get modded down because this is flamebait. "If you don't want to get sued for doing X, don't do X" is an extremely shallow, closed-minded and unintelligent oversimplification that assumes people should be able to be sued for doing X in the first place.

If it is illegal, you can be sued for doing it, whether or not you actually have done it.

A major purpose of the trial -- which comes after you have been sued -- is to determine whether or not you did what you were sued for doing. If there was away to assure you were guilty before you were sued, we wouldn't need trials.

The issue here is not about whether downloading movies should is illegal. The issue is that the plaintiffs cannot provide any tangible evidence that a movie was actually downloaded by the person they are accusing, because they have no control nor dominion over any of the computers and networks involved in the transaction.

They get logs from an ISP which they do not own nor manage, produced by software written by a third party, yielding IP addresses allegedly caught transmitting "illegal bits".

The law is pretty clear on whether copyright violation is legal or not.

Using the "I'm not likely to be one of the people they choose to pursue action against" strategy seems, as time goes on, to be a less-than-optimal one.

But since we're commenting on flamebait mods... the whole article is flamebait for slashdot. The only reason this is newsworthy is because it includes Uwe Boll, make of some of the most nerd-despised movies on the planet. It's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers -- the only reason this article made the main page is so we can flame (1) entities that pursue enforcement of their IP rights and (2) that director of tripe, Uwe Boll.

Seriously, it's hard to complain about flamebait posts when that's the very nature of the article.

But since we're commenting on flamebait mods... the whole article is flamebait for slashdot. The only reason this is newsworthy is because it includes Uwe Boll, make of some of the most nerd-despised movies on the planet. It's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers -- the only reason this article made the main page is so we can flame (1) entities that pursue enforcement of their IP rights and (2) that director of tripe, Uwe Boll.

I disagree. I had never heard of Uwe Boll until he started his lawsuit campaign. The reason this issue gets under my skin is the egregious abuse of copyright and the court system, not because of the person doing it.

Saying that "it's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers" is dangerous- do you want such actions to become the accepted norm?

Saying that "it's no longer news when a media rights holder pursues action against infringers" is dangerous- do you want such actions to become the accepted norm?

It doesn't bother me one way or the other. I don't knowingly violate copyright. If copyright law gets changed, then my actions may change. Until then, I buy the media I choose to consume, and if I don't think the price is right -- I do without.

The key reason the pursuit of action against violators is not newsworthy is that we know it happens frequently. This is nothing new. What would be more newsworthy are articles about how enforcement is changing, or articles about how the law itself is changing. Yet another copyright holder suing due to infringement just isn't news anymore.

One other note:

I disagree. I had never heard of Uwe Boll until he started his lawsuit campaign.

You must be new here:) . Luckily for us, since Germany (and other countries) closed the tax loophole investors in his films were taking advantage of, he hasn't been getting a lot of work. The tax loophole is what made his bombs profitable despite their dismal ratings.

It doesn't bother me one way or the other. I don't knowingly violate copyright. If copyright law gets changed, then my actions may change. Until then, I buy the media I choose to consume, and if I don't think the price is right -- I do without.

Wow, someone with a grown-up attitude on this topic, posting on/. Thank you.

Since you seem to be a little dense, let me explain my position in full:

In a market-based system, actors in the system make choices that depend on information.

If I were to pirate an album, or a movie, the information I'm giving to the rights holder of that IP is that I want their product, but I'm not going to pay for it because I can get it for free. Their options are then to compete on pric

I think our copyright laws are ridiculous -- not in principle, in my case, but in terms of the punishments for violating them, and in the duration of the copyrights. I would like it very much if the laws changed to make them more reasonable. But I'm convinced that piracy on my part would contribute to making things worse for me, worse for you, worse for everyone.

In a lot of cases, the only real way to get a law changed is to ignore it on a very wide scale. Even then it takes a lot of time, but it does work-right now, the marijuana laws are being changed, not on the principle that it's more against the public interest to outlaw marijuana than to legalize and regulate it (though a strong case may be made that this is true), but because it's impossible to realistically do so.

I think the same may be true for copyright. Only the "industries" who produce imaginary property (commonly known as IP) can buy Congresspeople to pretend that shit they make up is not only real but is "property" of some kind. Copyright etc. was never intended as a property right, at least not in the US-the Constitution states not only that it may be taken away after a specified time period, but that it must be. Contrast that with its treatment of real property, where it may never be taken away without just compensation. Its purpose was also clearly specified-"To promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts." Not to pay anyone, not to protect or establish a property right, not to advance anyone's private interest. Only to advance a public interest-promotion of science and art. If science and art would be best served with no copyright or patent law, this clause would not only allow but mandate that these laws be repealed at once.

I'm not sure that's true. I'd support a genuinely limited time (no longer than 10 years), commercial-use-only copyright, in the interest of said promotion of science and art. On the other hand, suing people for making a remix of a song or movie scene does not advance science or art, it diminishes it. Copyright terms so long that they exceed a normal lifespan do not promote science and art, but diminish it. Ridiculous scope of patentability, from software to genes, does not advance science and art, it diminishes it.

And at this point, no one's around to throw as many bribes, erm, excuse me, "free speech contributions" at reducing the excesses of these laws as at making them worse. The only real chance at reform is to make them untenable and unenforceable, and the only way I can see to do that is to ignore them. By all means, be smart about it-use a VPN, use encryption, use smaller trackers. But the only way I'll voluntarily comply with copyright law is when it comes within reason. I already do that where individuals choose to exercise reasonable terms-I'm happy to pay for music at Magnatune or donate to open source projects. For anything else, you betcha I'll download it, and not feel a single twinge of guilt. If you're going to attempt ridiculous terms and artificial scarcity, I don't feel in the slightest bad about subverting you. Quite, in fact, the opposite.

And to answer an argument so common it's nearly inevitable anymore, such a universe may mean that some business models go obsolete. But if that's the case, they already are obsolete, and we're just propping them up with laws pretending they're not. C'est la vie, so to speak-business models go obsolete all the time. We shouldn't force everyone to pretend the world works in a way it no longer does to prop up an outdated model, we should find new ones that work with the new technology and reality. If that means the end of certain video games, or Hollywood movies, or what have you, well, somehow, the human race survived without those for some time. And it's not like our desire for such things will go away-someone will find a workable way to do them, whether that's raising funds in advance, doing them collaboratively, or what have you, and those who are aficionados will likely pay or participate. If not, they die out, and so their time came like so many things before them.

No. In order to be a valid point, it must be true, and the idea that "if you don't do it you won't get caught" has been proven false [slashdot.org]. Specifically, innocence is no guarantee that you won't get sued.

The more people get sued, the more ridiculous it will seem to the outside observer, and the more support there will be for copyright reform.

Sorry, but your expectation rest on the assumption that politicians gives a flying f_ck, and that somehow common sense would prevail in a system where every politician is bought and paid for by special interest groups.

On the one hand, we have people who copy data without paying the creator. They have a small impact on the creators' financial incentive to create, and potentially reduce the cultural output.

On the other hand, we have Uwe Boll, who produces films that are so mind shatteringly bad that people need weeks of expensive therapy after watching them, taking money away from competent film makers and causing an entire generation to lose respect for the cinematic medium.

Finally, we have people who pirate Uwe Boll movies, intentionally spreading them to a large unsuspecting population.

People in category one are selfish. The person in category two is unfortunate. The people in category three are dangerous sociopaths.

Last I read German law was changed so that he could no longer use German taxpayers' money to fund bad movies, which is why his budgets have dropped dramatically. Though I haven't really been keeping up on what he's been doing in the last couple of years.

You can get a refund. But don't sit through the entire move and then go demand a refund. That would be like eating an entire meal then saying you don't want to pay because it wasn't good enough. How bad could it have been if you finished the whole thing? Leave in the first 20 minutes or so (you'll know if it's bad by then) and go find a manager to demand a refund.

I almost did that with Battlefield Earth but it was like watching a slow-motion pileup on an icy road. I just couldn't stop watching. They s

IP spoofing is not impossible, but is prohibitively difficult (nigh impossible) on the internet as a whole. It would be possible to do it on smaller networks, however. ISP-level is possible, and I would be surprised if there have not been cases of people tricking ISP hardware into thinking they were someone else. There is quite a lot an "unlocked" modem can do, which is why ISPs will cut your service if they find out you're using one.

Yes, kind of. The torrent app will connect to the tracker (usually via UDP) and send it's IP address. There is an (optional) field in the message your computer sends to the tracker that may contain an IP address. It's possible that if you enter your enemy's IP address there, that it might work on some trackers. If not, you could just spoof the packet's source address to whatever you wanted.

Because they'd rather get involved in endless pedantic debates over the meaning of the word "theft" instead of just manning up and admitting they're choosing to do something illegal and immoral. (Sigh...and usually that will provoke a screamfest - "what's immoral is locking up work which wants to be free...", yabber, yabber, cliche, cliche - instead of an adult response. Can someone please tell me why two wrongs make a right in this case, apparently?)

Because they'd rather get involved in endless pedantic debates over the meaning of the word "theft" instead of just manning up and admitting they're choosing to do something illegal and immoral. (Sigh...and usually that will provoke a screamfest - "what's immoral is locking up work which wants to be free...", yabber, yabber, cliche, cliche - instead of an adult response. Can someone please tell me why two wrongs make a right in this case, apparently?)

Illegal? Few people contest that copyright infringement is against the law. But immoral? Morality is subjective. Piracy isn't automatically immoral simply because you say it is, basing your assertion on your beliefs about copyright law. Simply because noncommercial copyright infringement is illegal does not automatically make it wrong, and if you believe otherwise, there is no way to have a rational argument with you.

Before people choose sides in the War on Piracy, they ought to be required to have a basic understanding of copyright law. This lets them have at least a slight grasp on the issue instead of just mindlessly yammering about something they don't understand. And I would personally add that those evil pirates are much harder to demonize when you understand what a clusterfuck modern copyright law is and how it is abused by large corporations.

You've hit on an important point, but at the same time, I am left wondering if you understand copyright law yourself. And if you think you do, where did you get that understanding from (that's a general question for everybody reading)? Did you read the Berne Convention, or have you had to work with it on a professional level? Or have you been reading RIAA news articles?

And, for that matter, what branch of media are you dealing with? They're not all the same - the music industry is known for abusing crea